surprised as I was surprised?"

"You're very good--but it's rather late to talk of saving me." He held
out his hand in the mechanical gesture of leave-taking.

"How you must care!--for I never saw you so dull," was her answer.
"Don't you see that it's not too late for me to help you?" And as
he continued to stare, she brought out sublimely: "Take the rest--in
imagination! Let it at least be of that much use to you. Tell her I lied
to her--she's too ready to believe it! And so, after all, in a sense, I
sha'n't have been wasted."

His stare hung on her, widening to a kind of wonder. She gave the look
back brightly, unblushingly, as though the expedient were too simple to
need oblique approaches. It was extraordinary how a few words had swept
them from an atmosphere of the most complex dissimulations to this
contact of naked souls.

It was not in Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate; but
something in him cracked with it, and the rift let in new light. He went
up to his friend and took her hand.

"You would do it--you would do it!"

She looked at him, smiling, but her hand shook.

"Good-by," he said, kissing it.

"Good-by? You are going--?"

"To get my letter."

"Your letter? The letter won't matter, if you will only do what I ask."

He returned her gaze. "I might, I suppose, without being out of
character. Only, don't you see that if your plan helped me it could only
harm her?"

"Harm HER?"

"To sacrifice you wouldn't make me different. I shall go on being what
I have always been--sifting and sorting, as she calls it. Do you want my
punishment to fall on HER?"

She looked at him long and deeply. "Ah, if I had to choose between
you--!"

"You would let her take her chance? But I can't, you see. I must take my
punishment alone."

She drew her hand away, sighing. "Oh, there will be no punishment for
either of you."

"For either of us? There will be the reading of her letter for me."

She shook her head with a slight laugh. "There will be no letter."

Thursdale faced about from the threshold with fresh life in his look.
"No letter? You don't mean--"

"I mean that she's been with you since I saw her--she's seen you and
heard your voice. If there IS a letter, she has recalled it--from the
first station, by telegraph."

He turned back to the door, forcing an answer to her smile. "But in the
mean while I shall have read it," he said.

The door closed on him, and she hid her eyes from the drea